Contentious Politics Under Right-Wing Populism: the Cases of Turkey and Hungary in Comparative Perspective

This paper aims to analyze the contentious politics generated by democratic backsliding under the rule of right-wing populist parties in Europe’s periphery as exemplified in the cases of Turkey and Hungary, and to explore more generally how and why populist leaders curtail the democratic space. Among the most dramatic examples of this trend, the Turkish and Hungarian cases display very similar political patterns despite their dissimilar histories and cultural traditions. No other cases of democratic backsliding have surprised analysts more than Hungary and Turkey, whose right-wing populist parties, i.e. the Justice and Development Party (AKP, Turkey) and the Hungarian Civic Union (Fidesz), came to power with strong parliamentary majorities in 2002 and 2010, respectively. Both are right-wing populist parties that accommodated neoliberal ideas within a conservative cultural agenda in times of economic crisis. Despite promises of political reform, however, once in power both parties transformed their regimes along majoritarian lines, governed state institutions in a partisan manner, kept the national media under tight control, and curtailed the political arena to tilt the playing field in their favor. How did these regimes consolidate their rule in recent years? When the main opposition parties in both cases proved unable to prevent democratic backsliding, both countries witnessed the rise of strong anti-government popular protest movements. The paper hypothesizes that several populist strategies, namely polarization, anti-elite mobilization, attacks against representative institutions, created the mechanisms through which the ruling parties in both countries counteracted these protests, thus resulting in democratic erosion. Accordingly, a majority of voters gave their consent to these policies, in large part due to the government's successes in generating economic growth post-2001 crisis.